Wait a minute, that seems a little wet....ah fuck!

My thought for today is don’t try to turtle head or prairie dog it when you have diarrhea. For those of you that don’t know what turtle headin’ it or prairie doggin’ it means, try to imagine a turtle poking its head out of its shell part way and then pulling it back in. Picture in your mind a prairie dog standing up in his hole and then ducking back down. Now think of a time when you had to go to the bathroom with a doozy of a twosey. I don’t mean you just needed to use the facilities, I mean you had to go and you had to go right fucking then. You may very well have been prairie doggin’ it and that’s where these phrases came from. For some reason I also think of the game Whack-A-Mole when I think of prairie doggin’ it.

Anyway, do not try to turtle head it when you have diarrhea unless you want a serious fucking mess to clean up. I don’t know that I have ever tried to do that but I can tell you that I have had more than one fart before that turned out to have a little more substance to it than I would have preferred. As you know matter generally comes in one of three forms; a solid, a liquid, or a gas. As far as shit goes, there isn’t all that wrong with any of these forms until they start blending into one another and mixing it up.

Imagine my disappointment when I was sitting in my easy chair and I arched my back a little to let one rip in good shape and shit my pants instead. I’m talking about the kind of fart where you tighten your stomach muscles up in good shape to get ready for the command to fire and then you grit your teeth. It’s the kind of fart that you know is going to stink even though you also know you’ll sit in because everyone likes their own brand right? The only people that say they don’t like the smell of their own farts are the people that lie about masturbating. Otherwise you would never fart willingly and that would make everyone in the world a bloated pissed-off asshole. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with Kim Jong Il. He seems like a bloated prick, but maybe he’s just full of North Korean gas and needs a good fart.

I can tell you with a certain level of authority on the subject that when you shit yourself and you’re an able bodied person it doesn’t take long to get moving and try to find a bathroom. I know that when I shit in my pants in that fucking chair I was up like a flash and hoping that it hadn’t gone all the way through my clothes. It did of course but I didn’t tell anyone and I save that chair for company now so it’s all good.

The hardest part about shitting in one’s own pants (as opposed to someone else’s???) isn’t the fact that it happened but rather that it was supposed to be a damned fart. There was no warning whatsoever. No rolling of the stomach or cramping of the lower bowel, it just felt like a nice gas bubble. Until I tried to touch it off that is. I felt like I had been cheated and slapped in the face at the same time. If I had been trying to light that fart I might have come away with a flaming shit covered hand. I don’t know about you but I would not want to have to explain that one at the hospital. It may just be my way of thinking of the weird stuff too, but it would not surprise me to find a hospital somewhere in the world where this has happened more than once to the same damn fool.

That makes three times in my adult life thus far that I have soiled my drawers. The first time was in basic training and the drill instructor decided he knew my bathroom needs better than I did. I asked him if I could use the restroom and after he said no I held it as long as I could until gravity and loose bowels took over and I shat myself. I thought it was embarrassing asking to use the bathroom before this happened. After it happened I had to explain to this fucking six foot two genius of a man that I had now had an accident and could I please go to the restroom.

“Whatchoo, talkin’ ‘bout boy? You piss yo’ pants?” This guy was all about Ebonics before it was even a word. Now spell check tells me that not only is Ebonics a word, it is a word with a capital ‘E’. Imagine that. We’ve capitalized a word that we made up as a title to a fucked up way of destroying the English language. Nice.

“Um, no sir. I ah, well, I did the other”, I replied as quietly as I could without whispering. Keep in mind that I was eighteen and scared shitless (obviously) of this whole military experience and especially of this large black man who was staring at me with his unbelieving eyes. Try to keep in mind that as a person from a rural town in a rural state that this was one of the first black people I had ever met and less than an hour after introductions he was yelling at me and bouncing his big trooper hat off my forehead. Race relations at their finest.

“Ahh, that’s nasty. Get yo’ ass back to the barracks and clean up you nasty thing. Dayum!” Then he proceeded to let everyone else in the squad know what had happened and if they hadn’t all been so scared of him I am sure there would have been more than some sheepish grins at my expense.

Now, as a person of considerably more years than the young man in this part of the story, I wish I could go and find that drill instructor now and say thanks to him. Because of the actions of Technical Sergeant Harwell I made up my mind as a very young man that I would never shit myself again because someone was denying me bathroom privileges. Never again, will I volunteer to put myself in a situation where someone can tell me whether I can go to the bathroom or not. That one experience was the foundation for the hatred that I developed for the military over the next three years and nine months until I got out. It was the best thing that ever happened to me in a lot of ways because it showed me that I am not the kind of person that wants someone else telling me what to do.

The second and third times that I had an accident were both just that; accidents. The second time is the bit I just relayed above and the third time was shortly after that at work. I was standing up the third time but, once again, it was a fart gone wrong. That time it wasn’t quite as bad and it only cost me a pair of clean underwear. Other than having to finish the shift with no tighty-whitys on it wasn’t as bad as I thought.

I have since adopted another phrase and that is, ‘Never trust a fart.’ It doesn’t just apply to the old and infirm people, it works for everyone. Never trust a fart and don’t try turtle headin’ when you have the trots. Words to live by.